"I am no fan of radio hosts who get mean and personal. So I shed no tears for the Radio Sly-mer..."

"... who was this afternoon fired from WTDY-AM 1670 after 15 years," says David Blaska, as Midwest Family Radio dumps local talk radio and picks up the CBS sports package.

I call him the Sly-mer because he did things like call then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice an Aunt Jemima. He suggested that Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor performed sexual favors to win election, rejoiced at her diagnosis of cancer, and made fun of her children.

The man was on for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, so it's not surprising that — trying to be interesting/exciting/outrageous — he went too far sometimes, presumably many times. Such is life in free-speech America.

He obstructed my ability to hear Sarah Palin one time:



So what if he was a big old lefty asshole? He had his place here in Madison, where there should be local talk radio. It's sad to lose the voice of John "Sly" Sylvester. Ironically, the conservative talk channel, with Sly's counterpart Vicki McKenna, raves on. In Madison!

"Wisconsin’s Top 10 conservative bloggers..."

According to David Blaska.

Who was the Recall Walker movement's own worst enemy?

David Blaska has the nominees.

My post-recall question: What did Rahm Emanuel say to Tom Barrett to get him to run against Scott Walker?

Here's what things looked like on March 28th, before Barrett declared his candidacy for governor in the recall election:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped raise money for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett during a luncheon at the Italian Community Center Wednesday – a strong sign that Barrett will enter a likely recall race against Gov. Scott Walker.

Tickets for Wednesday’s luncheon ranged from $400 each to $2,500 for a table. The luncheon was closed to the media, and outside, there were about 75 demonstrators.

Barrett is running for re-election as mayor. He has said he’ll announce whether he’s jumping into the governor’s race sometime between Friday and Tuesday. Earlier this month, Barrett said: “I’m seriously considering that office, but again, I love being the mayor of the city of Milwaukee, so that’s what I’m focusing on right now.”

On March 30 — 2 days later — Barrett announced his candidacy. His message at that point was that he would support collective bargaining, but he wanted to get to a compromise, bringing in all sides. "I'm going to try to heal the state. I'm going to try to restore the trust." This contrasted to what was being said by his rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Kathleen Falk — who'd announced her candidacy back in January. Falk had captured the unions' endorsement by pledging to veto any budget that did not restore public unions' collective bargaining powers.

Now, I think the polling numbers showed all along that Scott Walker was going to win the recall election, so something else was at stake that drove Emanuel to Milwaukee to propel Tom Barrett into the race. The real interests had to do with the national Democratic Party and the fall elections.

Here's something David Blaska wrote back on March 19 —  before Emanuel came to Milwaukee, but with the fundraiser planned. Blaska noted that Emanuel had unsettled the unions in Chicago:

Rahm... criticized his predecessors’ deal with the teachers union. Bill Daley and schools chancellor Arne Duncan (now U.S. Secretary of Education) gave the union “hefty” pay increases and a shorter school day in return for some union love. Says the new mayor, “I know what the teachers got and I know what the politicians got. But I don’t know what the kids got.”

Mayor Emanuel got legislation giving districts greater authority to fire teachers, reform tenure, pay for performance, and lengthen the school day and school year. He’s also a big fan of charter schools. His new school chancellor, Haitian-born Jean-Claude Brizard, worked with school reformer Joel Klein in New York City.

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Barrett was no big friend of the unions:

The major downside to a Tom Barrett candidacy is the same as his strength: public sector labor bosses hate him. Barrett tried to take over Milwaukee public schools; despite a Democratic governor and both houses of the Legislature, they could not beat the teachers union. Barrett has also used Walker’s “tools” to balance his budget. He actually wanted greater pension and health insurance leverage vis-a-vis his police and firefighters, although those unions are specifically exempted from Act 10 reforms.

“With Emanuel set to appear in Milwaukee for Tom Barrett on March 28, it is clear that Barrett is poised to become Obama’s pick to unseat Walker,” claims The Badger Democracy blog.

In “Why would Tom Barrett run for governor ... again?” Badger Democracy says it “examined the role Rahm Emanuel played in Free Trade policies (NAFTA), union busting, and privatization from his years with Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to the Chicago Mayor’s Office. Does Tom Barrett represent the energy and power of this recall movement? How many times has Barrett marched with teachers and firefighters? How many times has Barack Obama actually stood with Labor in Wisconsin ...?”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: next time someone asks why can’t Republicans elect a moderate, turn the question around on them. Why can’t Democrats elect a moderate?

But Barrett got the Democrats' support in the primary, knocking out Kathleen Falk who would have wedded the Democratic Party's image in Wisconsin to the unions. And Barrett proceeded to avoid talking about collective bargaining, making his issue some vague blather about healing and trust. That is, he ended up with a generic non-message of the sort that has worked for Barack "Hope and Change" Obama.

So what did Rahm Emanuel say to Tom Barrett? Was he conveying the message that you are Obama's pick, and we need to do this for the sake of the party's future? And this includes losing, because we know from the polls that you are going to lose. And, after today, we are not going to help you. In fact, although you are Obama's pick, you are picked for the purpose of keeping this pro-union message off of the President. He will not appear by your side in Wisconsin. He might do fundraisers just over the border in Minneapolis, making a show of shunning you. We'll throw you a tweet of support — in less than 140 characters — on the eve of the election. This is all understood.

In that light, Barrett stoically did what he was supposed to do. He lost, and he did it in a way that allowed much of the media — which is substantially pro-Obama — to interpret the June 5th election as a crushing loss to the public sector unions but somehow nevertheless good news for Obama.

Now, let's look back to that Badger Democracy ("Progressive Truth in Journalism for Wisconsin") item that Blaska linked to (above). That was written on March 15th:

For over 14 months, this struggle has begun and continued without the support of Barack Obama and his Administration. He was not on the ground with us marching against Act 10 – in fact, many of us have pleaded  for his support since this struggle began. Now, facing an election, Obama needs Wisconsin as a critical battleground state. His obvious intention – to link his campaign with the energy and power of the Wisconsin grassroots movement with Tom Barrett as the capital “D” Democratic candidate.

The "energy and power" maybe, but not also the lefty politics.

Does Tom Barrett represent the energy and power of this recall movement? 

No, but that was the point. To capture the energy, but launder out the left-wing issues and ideology. Barrett was to be exploited by the Party as a firewall, allowing Party insiders to use the energy of the Wisconsin protests without getting burned by issues and attitudes that scare off mainstream American voters. (The Party was struggling with a similar problem with respect to the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

How many times has Barrett marched with teachers and firefighters? How many times has Barack Obama actually stood with Labor in Wisconsin or against job-killing free trade bills? When has Rahm Emanuel honored the negotiating process of collective bargaining? The political actions of these candidates speaks volumes about who they are, and what they represent.

Exactly.

If Tom Barrett were to decide to drop out of the Milwaukee Mayor’s race to run for Governor because people are overwhelming in their demanding that action, so be it. If he were to win a competitive primary, so be it. But – if Barrett intends on running as a pawn to the Obama Administration and beholden to that corporate money; and using the grassroots momentum for that political end – it will serve no good for the people at the heart of this movement or Wisconsin itself, and we all lose the potential to change the politic in Wisconsin for the benefit of the people.

Ask yourself the question – what does this movement represent, and do the actions of Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Tom Barrett embrace those beliefs?  

Responses are welcome. Solidarity.

Here's my response: They owned you.

"Tuesday’s recall election was a giant repudiation of Big Labor."

"It was a huge smackdown of the union bosses by a Wisconsin that is 86.5% non-union and tired of all the whining. Gov. Scott Walker was the real winner last night."

A scientific calculation of the advantages and disadvantages of the 2 leading candidates in the Wisconsin recall primary...

"Final score: +1 for The Kathleen. (Toasting Mary Bell of WEAC and Marty Beil of AFSCME.)"

"When will ‘The Kathleen’ Falk and Tom Barrett get their Walter Mondale on?"

Asks David Blaska, very intraWisconsinly, except to the extent that Walter was over there in that state that looms to our left.

"As his guy Scott Walker might say, while the rest of us were in church on Sunday, that's what Meade was up to."

The forum administrator over at Isthmus — "jjoyce" — starts a thread called "Meade being Meade," which (so far) mostly appears to be an attempt to defend the Isthmus's last-blogger-standing, Citizen Dave (who was once Madison's Mayor Dave (Cieslewicz)), who strains to crank out enough prose to suffice as the only blogger left . (They kicked out the brilliant but conservative David Blaska after a couple liberal bloggers left.)

Meade tends to comment — often as the only commenter — on Mayor Citizen Dave's blog — e.g., here — and Dave never responds. I guess he needs to crank out the next blog post so that whole blogging thing can appear to continue to be something that keeps happening at Isthmus, but as a result, you've got these belabored columns blog posts about some damned thing like Mayor Citizen Dave losing his luggage and then there'll be one comment, and it's Meade. Like Meade is the last word on everything Dave ever says.

Why doesn't anyone over there — e.g. Dave or Dave's presumably at least slightly numerous readers — pick up the thread? Why does the conversation go nowhere? Even jjoyce won't go there. He's got to start a separate thread in the forum to discuss the Problem of Meade. It's like Dave's is the lunch table no one will sit at.

Pro-Walker signage.

At Saturday's Tax Day rally, as photographed by Meade:



That's actually David Blaska, by the way. (Should we be repurposing the female candidate's name like that? Doesn't it make it harder to bitch about Sly mocking Rebecca Kleefisch?)

I don't know who this is, but I like the composition:



And I like this composition and don't know who this guy is, who looks like he's in more of a relationship with me than he really is:



Meade says I backed up into him, which accounts for the composition.

By the way, lots of people came up to me and asked me if I was Ann Althouse, and I invariably confessed that I was (and am). They all said they read the blog and liked it or thanked me for it, and none of them said "Where's Meade?," which made me realize all the more that those people at those other rallies who come up to me and say "Where's Laurence?" are really creepy.

Potential Walker recall opponents fight amongst themselves.

This looks painful. The more moderate Democrat — Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett — is getting nastily attacked proponents of the more left-wing candidate, Kathleen Falk. Here's the viral anti-Barrett ad (which hits him from the left):



That's going to hurt. Barrett looks far out of line with the spirit that drove the recall petitioning. And Walker's opponent will come straight from a battle with other Democrats. There's less than a month between the primary and the recall election. Based on that ad and predicting the attitudes that will develop in the next month leading up to the primary, I'm guessing Kathleen Falk will be Walker's opponent.

UPDATE: The Journal Sentinel does a fact check on this ad and concludes:

The largest state employee union says Barrett supported Walker’s bill to strip most collective bargaining rights from public employees. The group cites a video that includes a snippet of a radio interview in which Barrett suggests a way to break the stalemate.

Barrett did say it was important to separate the higher pension and health care payments from the collective bargaining changes. But he made it clear this was so the piece with broad support -- even from the unions -- could move forward.

In the part cut from the video, Barrett clearly states: "I would vote no on the changes in collective bargaining."

We rate the union’s claim False.

"I fought this road tooth and nail so that you’d be forced to ride the bus."

A proposal for billboards along U.S. 12, attacking Governor Walker's likely adversary in the likely recall election here in Wisconsin.

"Question: Where is the political Left on education reform?"

"Answer: In the trenches alongside the reactionary teachers unions fighting to preserve the failed status quo."

"Back in business — Blaska!"

Announces Meade, telling Isthmus readers to bookmark the new blog, but it's Isthmus, so Meade's immediately smacked down by one commenter who assures everyone that Meade "will be dropping [Blaska's] opinions on [the Isthmus forum] like they are science at every opportunity, so I don't feel the need to bookmark his page." And then everyone switches to talking about some other blogger on the same site, and she's apparently a complete idiot.

Blaska was the conservative blogger at Isthmus not too long ago. But Isthmus lost a couple of its liberal bloggers left — Jack Craver (remember when he trashed me?) and Emily Mills (remember when she trashed me?) — and if they'd kept Blaska, there'd only have been one liberal (Citizen Dave) to offset the one conservative, and that wouldn't make sense in a Madison, Wisconsin "alternative" newspaper now, would it?

Isthmus ousts its conservative blogger, David Blaska.

Pathetic!

Blaska's a terrific blogger, but it was obvious that the lefty readers of our left-leaning newspaper's website couldn't handle a sharp point of view humorously challenging their pat opinions.

From the link, which goes to an Isthmus discussion forum: "Firing Blaska was a candy-assed move. Isthmus is [a] rag. Own it." Ha ha. Meade wrote that.

Mic check... old style... with Vicki McKenna...

...and New Media Meade:

"The question is not whether but how will the student section at Camp Randall Stadium humiliate their Penn State foes?"

"I'm guessing they make a show of wearing shower caps and bath towels. Just a guess. I know that's gross and insensitive but so are those college kids, as were we at that age."

Attacks upon the neck.

Talk of a high-tech lynching got me thinking about the neck attack that made the news here in Wisconsin last June. Do you remember? State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was said to have put Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in a "chokehold." There was an investigation, a special prosecutor, and a decision against bringing criminal charges, but there was also an investigation by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, concentrating on judicial ethics, which nobody seems to talk about anymore.

Back in August, I wondered about the way nobody was talking about the Judicial Commission anymore, perhaps because the criminal investigation made it seem that Bradley was the aggressor and Prosser reacted in self-defense. When the tables were turned, the noise died down, but when there were only allegations that Prosser was the aggressor, protesters vilified Prosser:

This is the level of left-wing activism we witnessed here in Madison. A justice is despised because his decisions do not please liberals, and so, without thought, they forgot about things liberals like to love themselves for caring about, such as fairness and due process....

[Isthmus blogger David] Blaska demands apologies from people who should be "ashamed of their lynch mob mentality." He names the "practitioners of the dark arts of 'by any means necessary.'"

Speaking of turning the tables, liberal hypocrisy, and David Blaska, he's writing about a new incident here in Madison:

A Dane County prosecutor says she believes Madison Ald. Brian Solomon sexually assaulted a city employee who is assigned to work with the common council. But the district attorney's office won't bring him to trial only because, it says, getting a unanimous jury to convict would be chancy....

Is the Left calling for Ald. Solomon to resign? Not that I can tell. No righteous indignation from The Capital Times. Crickets at Madame Brenda's Forward Lookout website. No protest rallies in front of the Capitol. The drum circles are silent.

The Former Kathleen, County Supes Melissa Sargent and Diane Hesselbine, and Madison Ald. Lisa Subeck suffered no such reticence in organizing a shouting, chanting Capitol rally on July 12 demanding that Supreme Court Justice David Prosser resign for allegedly choking fellow Justice Anne Walsh Bradley. They did so even as the legal system was in the midst of a careful, detailed inquiry. No, the feminist lynch mob could not wait for due process....

Why the differing responses? We know why, don't we class? Brian Solomon is a liberal, he's Progressive Dane for chrissakes! He's for the victim (even if he creates some of them).

"The Left – Still Confused by School Choice."

"It is a sign of the sorry state of Wisconsin’s political discourse that a legislator drawing upon professional expertise to create non-controversial legislation to support a program that benefits his taxpayers is viewed as nefarious."

Via David Blaska, who says:

[Bill] Lueders attempts to hobble the burgeoning school choice movement by attributing its success to political intrigue rather than the increasing failure of the unionized public school model. His lengthy piece employs the conspiracy mode of journalism: pour in a spattering of unfamiliar organizations and names, suggest some back room string-pulling, hint at vote buying, and stir with implications of nefarious intention. Voila: an expose that exposes, if anything, the author's own bias.

(Click the Lueders tag if you don't remember where you saw his name before.)

David Blaska asks the incendiary question: "Is Justice Ann Walsh Bradley a liar or just very troubled?"

He marshals evidence from the investigative file. His conclusions are harsh, but I don't think he misrepresents what is in the file.

He makes inferences from Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson's hypothetical question to her law clerk — right after the incident — "Hypothetically, what you would do if someone got in your space?"

Why would she ask that unless it was her perception that Justice Bradley had just gotten into Justice Prosser's personal space? Blaska's point is to bolster the credibility of the other 3 Justices who said that Bradley rushed at Prosser. The other 3, unlike the Chief, are seen as allied with Prosser, so adding her perceptions to theirs is significant.

By the way, I think a reason for posing the hypothetical is to test a theory that reasonable people retreat. But the law clerk "responded to the Chief Justice something to the effect that he was 6'4" and young, so he wouldn't have to do much to a person." The law clerk, presumably a reasonable man, assumed that one would do something physical — "an arm block... or something" — to resist or deflect.

Also at Blaska's: the investigator's diagram showing the placement of the furniture and various Justices, showing Prosser had no room to retreat.

Lots of comments over there... including Meade's.

Honor my personal space bubble!

David Blaska notes a hilarious assertion by Isthmus blogger Emily Mills (who still owes me an apology). Mills, in an effort to spin the Wisconsin Supreme Court "chokehold" incident, says:

Yes, everyone agrees that Bradley was moving toward Prosser.... And if I were moving toward someone, asking them to leave a room, I would also expect them to move. You don't have to be "charging" someone to expect that. It's called a personal space bubble - most people reflexively honor it.

So... when you're standing there in your personal space bubble, and I decide to swiftly relocate my personal space bubble into the place currently occupied by your bubble, you need to move your bubble? I'm picturing something like bocce ball, but more bouncy. There's honor for you!